Apologies for not posting last Sunday. I had drafted an article in my usual vein, and was nearly ready to publish, when the news of digital passports for the energy industry popped into my inbox and destroyed my mood.

Before I could re-write an article in response, I took quite ill with acute stomach flu, lasting right up until I had to go to sea again. Although it was just for a day, I’ve been a busy boy.

Anyway – what’s wrong with digital passports? Well, the clue is the stupid way in which they are being marketed to us in the industry:

1. The claim that the passports will allow our fire-fighting/safety qualifications to be recognised in different sectors because they are now digital, is a complete non-sequitur.
2. You already have to upload all of your certificates online to the owner company database to get anywhere near an offshore energy installation of any kind.
3. Transferable skills should/could be recognised whether they are digital or not. All that needs to happen is for industry bodies and the coastguard to issue a guidance note for this to be enacted in regulation.
4. The problem with digital passports is that your qualifications can be ‘switched off’, whenever the central controlling authority decides.

The arbitrary consolidation of power like this in Britain, and in this global industry, is truly terrifying. The potential for chaos through incompetence alone should be enough to put people off.

Anyway. I’ve decided. I’m going to retrain as a plumber or something. I don’t want to be part of such a corrupt industry when the bureaucrats take complete control of all private comings and goings in the commercial energy industry.

Please enjoy my prior article, below:

License to Shill?

State Licensed Occupations. Boétie Knew Best.

‘Go to Port, More to Port’! ‘Now, F#*&ing Hell, CLOSE – ING, More to Port’!

My crewman’s wind-muffled Lithuanian accent on the radio is telling me nothing I don’t already know. My planned manoeuvre was going wrong. On approaching the berth, I intended to split the sticks and swing the ship round to Starboard, as close as possible to the Viking ship berthed ahead of us, because the Pilot had warned us of uncharted shoal patches hiding awfully close to our berth. Only, in focusing on avoiding one danger, I failed to account for another danger. Strong cross-currents!

In the middle of my swing to starboard, my ship starts rapidly setting downstream, and the distance between us and the giant Viking boat closes at an alarming pace. I put my starboard engine almost full astern to accelerate the swing and pull us back upstream. Even with the engines screaming at 90+% load, the force was unable to overcome the strong tidal flow. At 111% Spring tide, the pilot had warned us that the Ebb in Montrose could reach 8 knots in the channel. It may have been only 5 knots here, but it was on the beam. Enough to make a mockery of my ship-handling abilities.

I aborted the manoeuvre, with at least a good 30 cm of space between us and the big ship. Safety first, I thought. (She is a steel-hulled icebreaking anchor-handler, ten times our size. We are an aluminium bath toy. She would have won).

Right, no time to worry. Re-approach. More throttle. Give myself more room. Forget the uncharted shoals, we’ve probably got enough water (ahem). Swing around faster, further off, and use the joystick to get her alongside this time.

Jobs a good ‘un. Brown trousers to the laundry. Cup of tea, fill out the logbook and power down.

I can laugh about it now, after a couple of days of doing better manoeuvres. Ship-handling is one of those things that can only be learned by doing. Simulators don’t cut it. Books barely scratch the surface. Technical diagrams about the pivot point, transfer, and advance offer no advice on the mental preparation, emotional control and visualisation skills required to actually perform the task of bringing a ship into port.

I’ve had my Master Mariner’s 500GT license for over two years now. I received the news that the Coastguard had awarded it to me, on appeal, while I was working on the Panama Canal. That was shortly before the world lost its mind in 2020.

However, it is kind of absurd for anyone to give me command of a ship, given that I have spent the last six years ashore in cushy office jobs, writing books and technical manuals for the shipping industry and the Admiralty. Yes, I’m quite smart. Yes, I have the piece of paper. But what does that matter?

Luckily after being around boats for most of my life at this point and having had a lot of ‘time on the sticks’ driving tender boats as a cadet, I do have some skill that is coming back to me. I’m growing in confidence and competence every day. But still, our modern attitude to the licensing of occupations is, in general, scandalous. My license and rank are no guarantee against misjudgement.

I mean, let’s look at some other professions by way of comparison. Say, oh, I don’t know… the medical profession?

Is a license to practice medicine based on, or later augmented by, your track record of curing patients?

No, it’s issued based on whether you comply with regulations imposed by the state, and the most corrupt trade union in Britain, the BMA.

Were the covid mRNA treatment jabs licensed based on the number of people cured or prevented from contracting the disease?

No, they were approved on an ‘emergency exemption,’ obtained by following government protocols for licensing a treatment, without any long term evidence.

Will employers, recruiters, companies that mandated jabs, or border agents face any liability for enforcing jabs that have a negative efficacy (after 3 doses) and worsen covid, and cause unprecedented injuries to those who receive them?

No, because they were following government guidance at the time.

We see this all the time in shipping. It is a widely known fact that all ships are effectively discharging sewage directly to the sea, despite strict environmental regulations that such discharge is ‘treated’ so that it is as clean as tap water before discharge. However, the environmental rules only check that the shipping company purchases a ‘government type-approved’ sewage treatment plant. Therefore, inspectors do not assess the effluent that is discharged for bacteria (i.e., end point testing for efficacy). They only check for compliance with purchasing a state licensed piece of equipment. A boon for the manufacturers of such equipment, but nobody else.

One study into the efficacy of sewage treatment plants by a Scandinavian port state was attempted some years ago. They evaluated the output of the sewage treatment systems for harmful bacteria, which are supposed to be neutralised by biological agents in the system, and/or UV light or chemical means. Every single ship tested, failed. And no ship could be detained because their systems were all ‘Type-Approved’ by their flag state and maintained proper certification. The study was abandoned early, and its findings not widely reported.

Similar silliness exists in the multi-million dollar industries for exhaust emissions, ballast water treatment and garbage management from ships. I say silly because the real environmental problems of over-fishing and dumping fishing nets in the ocean go on, almost completely unchallenged.

I met the CEO of Terragon at an arctic shipping summit in Montreal a few years ago (when Canada was only half technocrat), who gave a presentation on the technology he developed that recycles water from sewage and so on and is so efficient that ships using it effectively become emissions free.

I asked a senior delegate from the Canadian Coastguard who dined with me at lunch that day, why Canada isn’t mandating this technology on all ships that transit their arctic waters?

He said that, because there was only one manufacturer of this equipment, they couldn’t do it without being accused of handing an effective monopoly to a single preferred corporation. Even if it was run by a first nations community in the arctic.

The Canadian Coastguard at that time had far greater free-market credentials than any other civil service branch I’ve ever encountered. The entire purpose of international regulations in shipping, at times, seems to be to offer nearly exclusive rights and regulatory capture for a few ‘anointed’ type-approved equipment manufacturers.

Life rafts, Lifejackets, ECDIS (Sat Nav to landlubbers), rescue boats, etc. Every single piece of equipment that needs to go on a ship is heavily regulated. Manufacturers are required to ‘license’ their products, and ships are only allowed to carry those products that meet the specification.

Sounds reasonable, enough? Safety first, after all?

Except no. You can buy a boat that more than doubly meets the standards set out in the regulations, for less than half the price of a type approved one. Except, that you are not allowed to, unless you follow a lengthy and expensive government regulated process, to prove that your dinghy floats. Such high standards, that approved lifeboats remain one of the greatest causes of death and injury at sea. These things are so dangerous that the UK has actually proposed a discussion on banning lifeboats, due to the number of maimings and deaths caused by their ‘type-approved’ design.

And does it mean greater safety, or does it simply slow down innovation and restrict the suppliers of safety products? Well, consider this fun fact. Of the twenty-four safety recommendations made by the incident investigation after the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, only twelve have been properly implemented today. Two sensible ideas in the spirit of those recommendations – having enough lifejackets and life rafts for 100% of passengers and crew on each side of the ship in case the other side of the ship is inaccessible – only came into force after the Costa Concordia incident in 2012. In other words, the way we implement regulations serves largely to delay things, which we know full well should be done.  Indeed, the similarities between the two incidents, 100 years apart, including ‘ the authority gradient, group think, cognitive hysteresis, unanticipated consequences of new technology, latent organizational conditions, and the ubiquitous trade-offs between efficiency and thoroughness’, show the limitations of our attitudes to the role of authority.

Regulation, among other things, restricts supply and inhibits competition.

The corollary with vaccine passports for C-19 is obvious. In my last job, there was a seagoing trip that I had prepared for, for over a year. I had written 90% of a guidebook for seafarers, and the next stage in its development was to join a couple of ships, follow our own guidance, and test it out to complete the guide. My subordinate in the office was selected to make the trip, because he had had two covid jabs, which was deemed ‘fully vaxxed’ at that time. I on the other hand, had no jabs, but had recovered from covid.

Now, we both had ‘papers’. I had gone to a private doctor and got myself a T-Spot test, which detects T-Cells that indicate long term (years, not months) immunity to Covid 19. I also timed it correctly and got an antibody certificate. My colleague on the other hand simply had a piece of paper that said he’d had two shots of Pfizer.

My papers showed that I was actually immune. His papers simply showed that he’d done as he was told. Guess which one was accepted for travel? (And by the way, he later got covid, and sadly, was quite ill).

Drivers’ licenses do not prevent car crashes. A Merchant Navy Officer license does not prevent accidents at sea. And a doctor’s medical license does not mean that your doctor knows how to cure your illness.

If my manoeuvre had gone wrong the other day, and I had crushed some crew members to death, or knocked one overboard and drowned him, what would happen? I could probably get it down to industrial manslaughter, by discussing failings of my dynamic risk assessment, and by demonstrating other precautions taken. But would the coastguard or the company who deemed me ‘competent’ because of my state issued license be held accountable?

Not a chance. They have no liability for the things which they have ‘licensed’.

A Merchant Navy Officer holds an ‘office’ as an agent of the state. The license signifies that they have submitted to an examination by another agent of the state. A consensus that the state is the highest authority – not competition or meritocracy – is what gives the license any value.

It is time we realised that the state cannot provide safety. Only bits of paper, compulsion and force.

That use of force can be a valuable service when applied correctly. However, we need to recognise the limitations and the pitfalls of such awesome power. And we need to identify when unscrupulous corporate entities are using the power of the state to inhibit their competition, and perform regulatory capture, to the ultimate detriment of society.

And FYI, these days, that would be all the time.

Once you start to notice that the authorities, may have no ‘authority’, everything begins to unravel. It gets more difficult now that we see institutions we formerly thought of as good, throwing away their moral authority with gleeful abandon, and the governments of the west spend and bomb their own credibility to shreds at the end of their recent hegemony.

Knowledge that authority comes from results, not pieces of paper, begins to change the way you make every decision. Realising that when Genesis said ‘we are all made in his image’, means that we each have an equal opportunity to hold knowledge, speak truth and build authority in our own lives.

One of the milestones a young officer cadet at sea has to go through is overcoming the desire to appeal to authority. Cadets, especially the ones who are good students in nautical college, tend to become safety snitches. They have just spent 3 years learning all the ‘rules’, and so they are keen to enforce them. Like little zealots, they put the ‘office’ back into ‘officer’ and give desk Nazis and border agents a run for their money.

This is a difficult one for me to square with Christianity. The bible explicitly says to obey the authorities, because they were put in their position by God. However, the execution and resurrection of Christ is clearly a story that says ‘enough is enough’. I think what we need to do is recognise the difference between legitimate authority, and arbitrary authority. (And that’s what this writer is trying to articulate with this blog, so subscribe now, for further detail).

Some say the Bible recommends first that we do not enter into confidences with evil people. Therefore, we must always be aware of the evil element in our decisions, or in the people around us.

‘Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, or set foot on the path of sinners, or sit in the seat of mockers. But his delight is in the Law of the LORD, and on His law he meditates day and night.’ – Psalm 1: 1-2

(I have a really good first-hand story of how I dealt with the safety snitch dilemma on a ship where everyone around me was breaking the law. But that is for another time, and possibly requires an entire book. I was going to wait about thirty years until I was sure everyone involved was dead already, but now it doesn’t look like I’ll ever go back to the Middle East or Russia, so I might as well publish it. Thoughts?)

The word ‘should’, should be banished from the mouth of all junior officers. At least until they learn first, to deal with what is.

If you never get over this instinct to appeal to authority, then you’re going to become the preening type of officer who can only work on a cruise ship, where everything is nearly perfect to begin with. It won’t do you much good to join a little old rust-bucket where you have to do everything yourself, and the main qualification your crew holds is a physical presence.

It is hard to move past that level. It is a never ending internal struggle for self improvement. Total ownership. Like the comfortable courtier described by to Étienne de La Boétie in his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, it is easy to find a ‘level’ in your hierarchy that is agreeable enough to spend the rest of your career in. You always have someone else to run to when you want to complain. You always have someone above you to blame, when things go wrong. It’s a comfort trap. The kind that many state-licensed journalists, doctors, pharmacists, soldiers, intelligence agents, company owners, politicians and other professionals the world over now find themselves in.

As you move up the chain of command, you begin to realise that pulling rank is the least effective method of leadership. Accountability starts with yourself. If your subordinates make mistakes, its your fault. If your leaders make mistakes, its also your fault. You have to lead everyone around you, both up and down the chain of command.

That’s why when I made another mistake at today’s arrival, I filled out a safety observation card reporting myself as deficient. I posted it on the notice board and emailed it to the office superintendent. Everyone can see that I am admitting my mistake and owning it.

If we all do a bit more of that…